Lat: 33° 53’ N Lon: 139° 33’ W
Today’s early morning trawl revealed three more myctophids, good news for our ichthyologist (fish specialist) Dr. Margy Gassel. We also found six flying fish and nine pre-production pellets. These pellets are the raw materials used to make plastic products and are usually transported by trains and container ships. After another late night, the Project Kaisei Science Team (PKST) rushed to catch some sleep before another set of trawls and filtration experiments later in the afternoon.
Flying Fish
The day started with a cloudless morning, and the overhead sun gave a clear vision of marine debris continuously floating by the ship. Even though we are on the outer rim of the gyre, there is still a large amount of marine debris in the ocean. Our afternoon trawl revealed an abundance of live ctenophores (comb jellies) and fish from the Carangidae (jacks) family in the trawl. Before releasing the ctenophores into their natural habitat, we placed them in a bucket of water with the small plastic particles, and discovered they were engulfing the marine debris. This is not surprising because they are considered voracious predators that indiscriminately consume anything of the appropriate size that they encounter. This gave PKST a direct visual example of how organisms in the ocean are affected by the small polymer particulates.
Environmental Pre-Production Resin Pellet
Later in the evening, the Brigantine Kaisei met with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography vessel R/V New Horizon in the middle of the North Pacific Gyre. Our first mate Adrian Thibeault-Stone brought a tender and welcomed Doug Woodring (one of the main founders of Project Kaisei), Professor James Leichter (from Scripps Institute of Oceanography), and Annie Crawley (a film producer and creator of the organization “Dive Into Your Imagination”). The three visitors from R/V New Horizon received a tour of Kaisei, and we discussed the progress of our research. As the night sky set in, we said our final farewells and the New Horizon visitors returned safely to their ship.
A year ago, when the idea for Project Kaisei was budding, it was hard to imagine this meeting in the gyre, testing strategies to sort out this insidious, environmental catastrophe. Although Project Kaisei started with a small group of concerned people, it took the collaboration of several different fields banding together to make these studies a reality. PKST and the rest of the Kaisei crew are starting to realize how calamitous this issue truly is and that it will take many more collaborative efforts to even skim the surface of the problem. We are proud to be a part of the first of many Kaisei missions and hope that our efforts will inspire further action.
R/V New Horizon as seen from S/V Kaisei
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